


to bloom cold

by requiodile



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Body Horror, Mystery, Past Torture, References to Medical Experimentation, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-14
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-05-06 16:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5423492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/requiodile/pseuds/requiodile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has nothing but his hungry little roots and his broken bark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to bloom cold

**Author's Note:**

> For the original art by offtide that inspired this and the tumblr version of the fic, click [here](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/post/135159647687/he-itches-under-his-skin-he-feels-strangenot-in). I don't know if you can see it, but offtide's original caption was 'it's the first day of spring'. without it, the fic doesn't have half as much meaning. This has been wasting away in my drafts for far, far too long, so I wrapped it up and decided to finish it. I hope you enjoy.
> 
> This is an AU where everyone is a 'magic' critter. But who is what, hmm?
> 
> Additional Warnings For: Potentially Gruesome and Unpleasant to Visualize Plant-Based Body Horror.

He itches. Under his skin, he feels strange—not in the constant, aching way that indicates that everything is functioning normally—so strange, as if his colorless skin has turned thick and brittle; as if with every labored movement he makes, it grows closer to splitting down his spine like a seam and spilling out the restless growth that he feels crawling out of his bones, coiling in his muscle and scratching raw at the parts of his interior that are neither flesh nor bone.

He has gone three weeks without proper rations, supplemental fluids, and nutrient packages. Perhaps this lack of proper maintenance is the source of his physical discomfort.

Although it’s a simple matter to dispose of his gear in exchange for civilian clothing, he finds it increasingly difficult to eat like one—like a civilian. And the summer sun is, is. The allure is so great that for three continuous days, he does nothing but venture out to different secluded rooftops and nurse a plastic gallon jug of water from sunrise to sunset. He takes off his hat, but not his shirt; he takes off his jeans, but not his socks or shoes. He stares straight up into the blue and lets the humidity seep into his pores. 

But, his legs, bare, show a vast series of scars, crisscrossing left and right and under and over, the remainder of the skin being pockmarked and luridly discolored. After the second day, a swollen bump forms in one of the deepest dents, adjacent to his knee; and on the third day, he rubs his living hand over the spot to find it much smoother than how it had been before. His flesh begins to fill in, and old welts darken and flake off in little chips, gleaming underneath--hard and white and wriggling in some strange companionship whenever he wriggles his toes. 

He drinks more water, but alone, it’s not enough.

He buys a large bag of white sugar from a supermarket, from a cashier with a ridge of horns along her brow and black, jagged claws. The woman in front of him in the line has no legs, but shifts along with the scaled tail that extends out of the bottom hem of her skirt. The man behind him in the line has wet hair that lies plastered against his skin, extending down the sides of his neck and underneath the collar of a polo shirt slightly stained with sweat and algal growth. Peculiar names come to him, unbidden; _ashers_ and _pondslithers_ and _fanghooves_. These sit alongside the terms that he does know; demons and melusines and kelpies. He knows them and has used them, but he no longer reports to anyone. There is no need for him persist with the terminology, so he passes over his exact change and bundles his purchase under his arm while he sifts through those other terms, the ones that must be familiar.

By the entrance of the store, an angel—a _shiner_ girl begs a quarter from her older asher brother to pay for a gumball; their wings flutter in argument, but the boy laughs when her feathers tickle his thin, translucent membranes. 

The exhibit at the museum had informed him—reminded him?—had shown his face, alongside that of the man he had been meant to kill. It said that he was a dryad, but the term sits clinical, and ill. He had once been called something else, he thinks. He can’t recall. Is that what he is? 

He has killed dryads before. The chosen procedure was fire, and they burned. They burned, so easily; even the ones he had to pull out of the water and set alight as they writhed.  


For those missions, they had him put on extra gear such that all his skin was covered; his normal mask was exchanged for one with a superior filter, and he received double his usual intravenous dose of supplement. 

He supposes now that it was to suppress his receptivity to chemical signals released by his distant kindred. He doesn’t remember having ever reacted, but he must have in order for them to have instigated such preemptive measures. 

Back on the rooftop, he fills a shallow basin—a child’s plastic plaything, a flimsy blue construction patterned with bulbous seastars and little red shovels—halfway with water and dumps in three-quarters of his sugar to dissolve; the rest, he pours into his gallon jug. His feet are crackling, and when he peels off his socks and shoes, his skin sloughs off in irregular patches a centimeter thick. It doesn’t hurt, not significantly so; but the wet flesh beneath is a brighter red than he recalls seeing within himself, and the fluid that begins to ooze isn’t blood, but rather a clear and tacky sap tinted more yellow than pink. 

The exhibit had said he was a dryad. The name is wrong; for a few moments after he puts his raw feet in the basin, nothing happens and he wonders if the classification itself was also wrong—but then, he begins to absorb the sugar and a sweet relief floods upwards, alleviating the stiffness so greatly that he loses his seated balance and falls backwards to lie flat on the concrete with his knees bent and his strange white bumps squirming all over. A bump on his ankle pops, and the sensation is so startling he sits upright and pulls out his foot to examine it; but his whole body complains, so he settles it back under and stares at the pale green root waving back and forth in the opaque water. 

Huh. As he watches, it feathers out and pulses, so gently. He focuses on the other bumps on his legs, and while he manages to distinguish distinct pulses in each, he accidentally pops another high up on his thigh, in an inconvenient place out by his hip. More conveniently, it retracts after a few moments exposed to air. It leaves a smooth, greenish patch behind that is at even topography with the rest of his flesh. He touches it. It feels more like skin than his actual skin.

A peculiar compulsion overtakes him, and he pops all of his roots with the edge of his shining, impervious left thumb; he pours more water in the basin when the level drops to the top of his feet. When he stretches, his chest cracks and slabs of coarse skin fall out the bottom of his shirt; the fabric sticks to the newness beneath, so he sticks his hands up underneath the stained red weave and starts to peel his skin all away in chips and chunks and collects it in a pile by the basin. It stinks, astringent, and the taste of himself is foreign in the air. 

He ends up using his two spare gallon jugs he’d secreted under the overhang of the building’s roof ventilation. Halfway through the third, he rolls over on his side and retches so violently that he cracks all down his back and belly and throat. A chip falls off of his forehead and lands in the black tar that issues from his mouth in spluttering stream.  


It’s nothing but tar for hours, and by the time it’s over, night has fallen and the cold reminds him to sleep. It always does.

Against his better judgement, prior experience, and ingrained procedure, he lies there, exposed. He does get entirely redressed, but curls up by his empty basin and his pile of chipped skin and the splattered puddle of poison that trickles out due to the uneven grade of the flat roof. His gun is in one hand, and his knife is in the other. The moonlight feels nearly as pleasant as sunlight, pleasant enough that he doesn’t wake up once in the night.

But, once the sun rises, he wakes. He takes the chips but leaves the black stain. He uses his flesh finger—still pallid, but more green than white, now—to wipe up the last residue of sugar from the basin and sucks it into his mouth. 

He feels hungry. He has pickpocketed several wallets, but he is still unused to most of the prices he sees around him. There is the distant inkling in his mind that money used to be worth much more, but he has enough to pick up a large container of powdered supplement. The label on the side reads, _Suitable for All Flora_.

He is a dryad. He is of the florafolk. But the exhibit had failed to inform him on the most basic level whether he was a tree, a shrub, or an herb. Although he knows he would surely benefit more from one of the specialized blends available, he is unlike the young woman behind the pharmacy window; he doesn’t have vines shifting through his hair. He is unlike the dryad couple sharing a lunch in the terrace of a cafe that he walks by; he has neither branches growing out of his head nor soft blooms in place of his eyes.  


He has nothing but his hungry little roots and his broken bark. He has nothing but the wrong name for himself and those like him—even though he knows one of the names that he is supposed to have. That he actually has. The right one.

He wanders in and out. Around. 

If the exhibit had been vague about what kind of dryad he was, the library is no better. He introduces himself to the pixie— _no, duster_ —librarian as _James_ , tells her that that he’s looking for information about his namesake, looking for records about his namesake’s relations. About time, y’know. Just curiosity. 

She looks at him and at the fractures which now cover his entire face. He pulls out a bandana he’s been using as a handkerchief from his pocket and dabs at a fresh trickle of sap that threatens to drop from his chin onto the wood of the information desk. He is very careful about not leaving biological evidence.

“Dear,” she says, soft and uncertain. Her eyes have no distinct pupil, iris, or sclera—a featureless indigo, they shine at depths as if they’re full of stars. It reminds him of something, but he can’t place it. She sits on a tall stool, and writes down something on a notepad with hands that have three fingers and no thumb. “I’d be happy to help, but your sloughing looks incredibly painful.”

She pauses. “If the hospital isn’t an option, my girlfriend finds that a long, hot bath really helps soften it up. Let me track down your materials, ok?”

“Ok,” he replies. When has he last had a bath? He has enough money to get a motel room, if he moves further out of the city. 

His mind works fast. It makes processing all of the data go much faster than it would if he weren’t...him. But the books parallel what was provided by the museum exhibit, sometimes delving into conspiracies and fabrications about his childhood, his romantic life, his sexual preferences, his known relationships, his home life, his jobs, his education, and his drafting and training and deployment and capture and torture and then—his reunion with his childhood friend.

After, it becomes a jumble of deciphering the truth out of the rumors of James Buchanan Barnes’ exploits with Captain America and the rest of the Howling Commandos. It is nearly all classified, even seventy years after the events detailed before him.

There is much to believe. There is much to dismiss. He is aware that he has a younger sister, two younger brothers. Twins. 

But at this point, what does blood represent, anymore? Even if he were to find them and see them, he would still have to identify what they were. Not all blood relations were the same. He had once killed a family of finnies, where the father had sleek cetacean skin and the mother had an array of scales—where each of their six children were different from each other in secondary species. 

He ignores the historical nonfiction about himself and looks to the internet. He has used it before, in some indistinct time. He pulls up so much information it might as well all be fiction, anyway.

The exhibit had said more about him than it had any of the other Howling Commandos, but paradoxically, remained vague about certain details of who the exhibit had been named after in the first place. 

There are multiple sources which place Captain America as a probable shiner above all else, and other which vehemently argue that he was most likely an asher. There are some which insist that he was particularly stable poofer, and others still which said that he was actually a corny or a gonno in the compressed, diminished form of a man. 

He stops at the one that says that Captain America was a dryad, like _him_ —the one that says that Steve Rogers never exhibited exterior traits due to the resilience of his pliable bark tissue, the one that explains away the massive increase in body mass and strength during Project Rebirth as the result of a highly balanced influx of nutrients and solar radiation, the one that accounts for the post-transformation flexibility and physical adaptability.

It sounds more right than the others, somehow, but he cannot be sure. This was something he must have known, from before. When he had fought him on the helicarrier, he had been unable to get any reading on what his opponent was.

He has no way to confirm. Not now, anyway. He would have to meet with who the world insists is his best friend. He has no current desire to meet with Steve Rogers. He is not sure what his desires even are.

However; if a hot bath will soothe the sloughing process, he would like one. He pain hardly bothers him. He has felt significantly worse, for significantly longer, but to feel nothing at all would be a welcome improvement.

He finds a motel that doesn’t ask questions. Not about his appearance or the multiple trips he makes in and out of his room, for more sugar and more supplement. He fills the tub with sustenance and water and strips. It is a darkly satisfying sensation to extrude his roots from the places on his body that were once indented—those reclaimed places where his roots had been cut and torn out by the base, over and over and over. Once in the tub, he reaches down and touches the highest one, right at the jut of his hip. They had to drill down to his bone in order to remove it, but it had regrown. They had all regrown. 

He allows his head to sink beneath the opaque slurry, surfacing only for air. He can hold his breath for upwards of an hour, and when the water level sinks, he simply turns the tap and refills it again. Occasionally, he can feel something detach from somewhere and float up and away. At first, he doesn’t bother to pick out his shed bark; but then after the fourth time he sits up to refill the tub, he can’t see the slurry for all of ugly, seeping parts of him lying dead on the surface. 

He tosses a towel onto the floor and deposits the flakes and slabs and chips on top. He’ll burn them, like he burned the others.

He doesn’t know how long he’s in the tub. Dimly, he’s aware that there are people who are seeking him out as a lost tool—but for some reason, he knows they won’t find him, not here. Not as he is now.

He soaks until he has consumed all of the sugar and supplement, and the tub refills clear. He had needed another towel for the last of his bark, and picks at the last stubborn pieces around his left shoulder with his knife until they too pop off. The new skin at that part of him, especially, is greener and tenderer and more irritatingly soft than the rest of him. 

He tests this by stretching, and finds that he can now flex far more easily than before; his limbs have a greater range of motion, and the same level of exertion does not tire him as quickly.

When he wipes the steam off of the mirror, he pauses at what his reflection reveals. The sloughing has taken off his uneven facial hair, as well as his eyelashes and eyebrows and, actually, all of his hair, everywhere. He looks very strange in the mirror, but perhaps that is due to the fact that the last mirror he’d looked in properly to examine himself had been sixteen years ago, in Brazil. Also, then, he had been bleeding severely from an explosion that had shattered his goggles into his face. It had been necessary examine himself in close proximity to remove the glass particulate from his eyes.

His eyebrows and eyelashes grow back quickly, within a day. His hair takes longer, but that is of minor concern. He finds a new cap to wear. People avert their eyes from him when he walks out upon the street, their faces blurred with mingled pity and disgust at the clean sap that exudes from his raw, green, and barkless flesh to stain his clothing like sweat and blood.

He walks. He runs. He watches the news and reads the papers and observes people using library computers until they make sense. The internet is as useful as it is useless—but there are videos, he finds, of Captain America walking and running and fighting; of Steve Rogers speaking uncomfortably before the press, of the man with an entire team systematically tracking down and destroying bases that ping in faded memory.

He watches Steve Rogers, and Steve Rogers looks old. The blond hair has darkened—from age? From weariness? From jaded pain and misery?—even though there isn’t a trace of grey or white or silver. The strong jaw has sharpened, the round cheeks have sunken, the line of the neck has been whittled away by work to nothing but tension and muscle.  


He watches Steve Rogers, and, despite himself, despite what he wonders and knows and doesn’t know, he turns away. 

He finds a place for himself, a small corner on the ninth floor of an old building where he speaks to the landlord by passing air out of his throat in a grey rustle like the wind through bare branches, and she responds in kind, whistling in a thousand swaying strands of fielded gold. With that, there are no more questions. They are like, he and her, and seeing how he crackles, still, she gifts to him one day a glass jar filled with rich brown earth. 

Each day, he sinks his fingers down, feels the earthworms inside tug and pull at his deadened, paper-thin bark. He takes up the nutrients in their casts, rummages for fallen rotten leaves upon the street for their joint consumption.

But still, he itches.

Sitting there, at his little wooden table on his little wooden chair, in the sunlight, he sprouts thorns and prickles and tiny, needling spines which he shaves off with his knife—a new one, a different one. His furniture was already stained, and it doesn’t hurt to remove them. It was routine for him to remove them, even before it became a part of his scheduled maintenance.

He remembers this. He remembers how fabric would snag on his skin, how the spines he’d shed would make Steve Rogers sneeze. 

He remembers how this was a bad thing, at the time. 

But it was something long ago, and he is here, and Steve Rogers is somewhere else, so he turns off his television and goes to put his fingers in the jar, again.  


How much time passes? Enough so that his bark thickens, darkens, becomes smooth and full like it must have been at the beginning. Enough so that his thorns grow in woodier and his prickles come in sharper and his needles form a crystalline carpet of organic shards all over the surface of his cracked tile floor. 

Enough so that one day, he sits outside with his legs through the grate of the balcony, dangling his knees down and scratching at the nape of his neck with the hand that doesn’t shine. 

He hears steps, but he just keeps scratching. He itches.

“Your door was unlocked.”

He gets no visitors. His neck is sore. “How did you find me?” he asks, without turning around. “I wasn’t exactly hiding, but.”

A laugh, muted. Subdued. Not a laugh at all, but an exhale, garbled. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who smells like apple without actually being an apple.” There’s something sad about the way Rogers says it, as if all apples ceased to exist years ago and the taste is both long forgotten and longed for. “Even when you weren’t blooming, your leaves…”

He has no leaves. “I don’t have any leaves.”

Rogers sits down beside him, cross-legged. He doesn’t look. 

“I shed all of my leaves. They don’t grow anymore. And if you want me for my thorns—I cut them off. I will always cut them off.”

Rogers says nothing. Rogers only leans forward into the grating, hands on the bars, eyes closed. “You always,” he whispers, “Started sprouting from your neck, in the spring. _Itched like hell_ , you said. _Worse after a long winter than a mild one_. I used to think that—“

He waits for Rogers to finish breathing. It’s a ragged thing, oddly characteristic and yet, not at all.

Rogers smiles, terribly. It is a terrible smile. It’s not even a smile. “I used to think that it was incredible how you’d come back to life after every winter—how you’d sleep like you were dead for a month and then come back, only to die again and wake up and die and wake up and die and wake up again, always. It was stupid of me to take that for granted, especially since I could only do that once, and never again.”

A _rebreather_. Steve Rogers is undead, is clot-blooded, is moon-rising and grave-speaking and suddenly, the perpetually alabaster undertone of that flesh, if natural, becomes evident as that of death and of nothing else. The sparse freckles dotted over Steve’s nose are ones that he remembers, so sharply, from 1945. They’re exactly the same; none are new, and none have faded.

“You’re dead,” he says. “You’re fucking _dead_.”

“And you’re alive, Buck.” Steve sounds like he’s about to cry. Bucky looks at him, and sees that he looks like it, too. “I’ve been dead since I hit the ice. You always woke up alive after death, and I just, just. I opened my mouth to breathe again when I woke up three years ago and it turns out I didn’t need to do that anymore.”

“You’re breathing now.”

“Force of habit. I’ve been told I’m too much like a statue otherwise.”

Bucky scratches at his neck. Leaves, huh? He doesn’t ask what he is, but he doesn’t need to; Steve says it for him. “When historians—when they asked me what I was, what you were, what Dum-Dum and Jones and the rest of them all were—when they wanted to know the details of our lives to fill in their academic papers and documentaries and books, I didn’t say anything.” Steve closes his eyes again. “The closest thing to the truth they’ve guessed is that I’m an asher that doesn’t show and that you’re an apple. Tree, I mean.”

And yet, apples don’t have thorns. “They’re not too far off,” Steve continues. “Rebreathers sometimes come back as ashers, and some ashers only show after they’ve died and reawoken. And apples are in the rose family, but there’s a difference between being an apple and being an actual rose.”

“A _rose_.”

“An eglantine, but you never liked that name. Thought it sounded like somebody was describing an egg that would crack open into orange juice, or you’d peel an orange only for a bird to pop out.”

Bucky frowns, and stops scratching at his neck to scratch at the peeling rust on the iron bars instead. It’s a sunny day, if breezy; the clouds pass by overhead and cash them in brightness, then shade, then brightness again. He thinks about it, thinks hard about it, about eggs and oranges and saving his knobbly rosehips in a little basket for tea that could stave off Steve’s first illness of the winter—and then he knows. 

“You would have made a better _sweetbriar_ than me,” he whispers. His neck burns, now, it’s crackling and splitting, he feels it, he hears it; a slick unfurling, a harsh bitterness that crawls up the back of his throat and makes him hoarse with the pain of it. “You used to be a prickly shit, and every time I thought you’d die from a cold or a cough or a knock on your head, you’d always get back up. Like some kind of fucking weed growing out of a crack in the pavement, getting run over by cars and pulled out all the goddamn time. You were waiting to die, but you couldn’t die if you tried. You had too many thorns to put underfoot and shake up how folks ran the world.”

Steve shifts closer, just so their shoulders touch. “I don’t think I’d have ever bloomed like you.” His voice is so soft, Bucky can hardly hear him over the sound of the wind going by. “The whole street smelled like you in spring, when you were flowering, and it was better than the nicest perfume in Sears; you’d give a girl a petal from your hair and she would practically howl to the moon and back, right then and there. I’d be a, a weed—“

“Weren’t ever a weed to me,” Bucky croaks, but when he turns his head, something turns with him and he freezes.

He reaches up to his neck, and touches something wet; he blinks, and it touches him back, with a fine spiny edge and little threadlike veins on the underside. 

Strangely, all he can think of to say is, “What month is it?”

Steve smiles. It’s not quite as terrible as it was before. His lips are too pink to have blood flowing through him, and Bucky knows that were they to reach out towards one another, Steve’s skin would only be warm from the sun that has been soaking into him. And yet—Bucky reaches. There’s a pulse in Steve’s palm, but it might just be an echo of Bucky’s own. There’s only one heartbeat between them, and it doesn’t feel as if it belongs to either, alone. He wonders who it belongs to, but then he realizes that he doesn’t particularly care. It doesn’t matter, not when it’s between them.

Steve’s still smiling, and his skin is warm. The air tastes like apples.

“April.”

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to talk to me on [tumblr](http://requiodile.tumblr.com), about anything.
> 
> Bucky is an [eglantine rose](http://requiodile.tumblr.com/post/135167350407/your-dryad-fic-is-stunning-can-i-say-stunning). The link leads to a brief tumblr post discussing it, and an additional stats PDF about the plant.
> 
> Steve, on the other hand, is not a vampire, but a mostly-immortal undead. He can sustain damage, and needs to maintain the undecaying, unaging state of body through the regular consumption of crucial bone, protein, and amino acids. Rebreathers can be split into different subtypes (like vampires), but it's a complicated and mysterious 'family'. A rebreather can be born into any race/species line and their emergence into a wholly new afterlife existence may not be realized until after their first natural death.
> 
> To be classified as a 'rebreather', all one needs to do is to 'breathe again' after death, with 'breathing' as a euphemism for no longer actually needing to breathe. Rebreathers, in their new afterlife, tend to lose the primary characteristics of their first life (dryads no longer exhibit vegetative growth and elves lose their magical ability), and exist primarily as still-moving, lucid corpses. The classical rebreather form (which Steve exhibits) is not possible for the less humanoid races (like merfolk, centaurs, and chimeras), but a postlife as a different subtype of rebreather is still possible. 
> 
> Steve was classified as a rebreather from birth, even though he also shared his mother's sylph affinities. However, being an exceptionally fragile creature of the wind, the only air he could draw to himself was the damn lousy kind, and since the winds he drew in had an intense proclivity for death, Steve was a walking omen of his own demise and eventual rebirth. The only question was when he'd be 'breathing again', not how it would happen. 
> 
> Modern-day Steve has no affinities for anything. He is a dead man walking; even if some of his physical traits mark him out as once being a sylph, that classification is entirely moot now that he's a corpse.


End file.
